GTO: The title refers to neither a car nor a Beach Boys song, but Great Teacher Onizuka, a 22-year-old homeroom teacher who gets in hot water after admitting on a TV talk show that he once almost buried a female student alive. He plies his trade at the educational institution known as, of all things, Kissho Academy.
This is the setup of Vertical Inc.’s latest manga imported for American audiences. Tohru Fujisawa’s series — in this initial volume, at least — plays an oddball mix of mild T&A horniness and a little less mild schoolyard violence. It is a tad more than mildly enjoyable.
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Gary Phillips, the excellent and criminally underappreciated Los Angeles-based crime-fiction author, is no stranger to comics. Fact is, he’s been producing series and graphic works for almost as long as he’s written his various novels and short stories. Among his more recent illustrated ventures is Vertigo Crime’s COWBOYS, a stunning example of how a complex and involving crime story can be told as a graphic novel.
At the heart of the story are two law enforcement officers, different in their professional approach and personal lives as night and day. Deke Kotto is an investigative cop who works the urban streets in a reckless, rogue manner that always seems to get results. But when he discovers the dead body of tax auditor, he’s assigned to drastically clean up his appearance, go undercover and follow the trail of the money the auditor was involved with.
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It’s with both great sadness and a sigh of relief that BLACK JACK: VOLUME 17 arrives — sadness, because this marks the end of Vertical Inc.’s trade-paperback reprints of Osamu Tezuka’s “peerless medical drama” manga; relief, because the publisher actually saw it through to the very end, as promised. I guess that meant the thing continued to sell.
If so, I’m not the least bit surprised. From the start, Tezuka’s series — first serialized from 1973 to 1983 — was a work of creative excellence, and stayed that way, through all these thousands of pages. If you’re looking to make an investment in a series that will pay off more than what you put into it, look no further.
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A doll possessed by the devil, a freshly dug-up corpse, a musician driven to madness, a mentalist with a twisted gift, a woman who suspects her husband is a vampire, a family driven by greed — these are among the tales of terror in the hardcover comics anthology INNER SANCTUM, written and illustrated by Ernie Colón.
Pegged right on the cover as being inspired by the radio program of the same name — which birthed a series of films starring Lon Chaney Jr. in the mid-1940s — the book presents stories in the spirit of the show, rather than adaptations.
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RAT CATCHER is another in Vertigo Crime’s series of wonderfully intense and suspenseful graphics novels incorporating some of the finest writers and artists working the field today. This one is a bloody and breathless story of betrayal and retribution that starts off with a bang and rarely lets up until the conclusion.
A fire breaks out in a house on a deserted stretch of road outside of El Paso, Texas. As the investigation begins, it is revealed that the location was a federal safe house, and one of its current residents was a criminal due to provide states’ evidence against a high-ranking mob boss. Moses Burdon, an aging FBI agent specializing for many years in witness protection, arrives on the scene in search of his partner, now feared dead from the blaze.
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